Monster Nation(59)

On the shelf above his stove she found a tin of sardines she thought she could open even with her numb fingers. She went back to the table and sat down, more than willing to give him the time he needed. On the floor near her feet, Jason Singletary moaned plaintively and wrapped his arms around himself as if he were very, very cold.





Monster Nation





Chapter Five


JESUS IS COMING

to eat your leg

[Graffiti in an Arby's men's room, Grand Rapids, MI 4/8/05]

Florence-ADX sat in the middle of a bowl filled with scrub grass. No trees grew in the fields around the prison, just rocks and weeds, nothing tall enough to hide a fugitive. The prison itself sat low on that empty ground, most of its bulk hidden under the earth, an animal digging itself into the soil against the threat of all that empty blue sky. The clouds overhead shot past on winds that tore them to pieces as they came howling down out of the mountains.

Clark rolled into the Supermax prison at the head of a convoy sixty vehicles strong. Deserted and besieged in a dying land the place looked more spooky than he would have liked'the refugees in his minivans and big rigs had been through a lot already and he hated to deliver them to such a frightening place, but there were no alternatives. He didn't have time to find another safe location to build a relocation camp. Clark nodded in approval when he saw what had been done in his absence'at least the place had been cleaned up, the dogs put back to work controlling the perimeter. The trailers that constituted Desiree Sanchez's domain, the Bag, had been moved inside the second tier of fencing, where they would be safe.

The man who had implemented those changes, Vikram Singh Nanda, waited for him at the main gate of the prison. Clark detached Horrocks to square away the men and get them started on their AERs. He greeted his old friend with a brief hug. Something clattered against the epaulets of his uniform and he lifted Vikram's wrist to get a good look. The Sikh Major wore a hammered steel bracelet on his left wrist. Not regulation, not by any means.

'It is my karra, a sign of my bondage to the teachings of the ten gurus,' Vikram explained, looking almost sheepish. 'I do not' normally wear it, though I should.'

'Trying to get right with your God,' Clark muttered, and clapped his friend on the shoulder as he headed inside to the warden's office. As requested someone had installed a cot and a dedicated communications terminal, a laptop that connected with Washington via a secure satellite network. He intended to spend a lot of time in the small room.

He sat down in the leather chair behind the desk and placed his sidearm in a top desk drawer. He steepled his fingers in front of him and then it all hit at once.

Bannerman Clark had gone for a week with little more than catnaps and cold noodles for sustenance. In that time he had fought a war.

He had butchered civilians.

Innocent, sick civilians who desperately needed medical care and basic services.

He had fought and strived against the unarmed citizens of the United States.

And he had lost anyway.

A cold emptiness like the void of space between galaxies opened up in his stomach and it went all the way down. He was empty, physically empty so that a slight wind could have come along and blown him away. The weariness in his arms and legs turned to paralysis and the buzzing in his head, the grinding, whining buzzsaw headache he always felt during combat operations unfolded into an entire machine shop of torment. Every moment of the battle for Denver waited there, separated and dissected, awaiting his careful analysis. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, going over these factoids, these isolated decisions from the fray. Just as he continued to think through and re-think every battle he'd ever participated in. Most of them he had won, with relatively little loss of life. Those were easy, just logistics reports, lists of numbers and names, so many bullets fired here, so much materiel consumed there. The ones he had lost were the same except the lists of names had ghosts paper-clipped to them.

Something other than a ghost came with this action. The girl. The blonde girl who had to be the key to the Epidemic. She had escaped while he was busy with the WOFTAM of trying to defend a doomed city.

Clark had never believed in something so strongly before, but he believed that the girl was the answer he sought. The answer to why this was happening, and the answer to how to stop it. She was the one piece of the puzzle that didn't seem to fit, the one person who was neither on this side nor that, which meant she had to be more significant that she appeared. She had never been farther away from him.